wayfinding

Joy Harjo, “Map to the Next World”
for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
 Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
 Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
 Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
 Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.
 We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
 Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
 What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.
 An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
 The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another.
 There is no exit.
 The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge.
 You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
 They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
 And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
 You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.
 Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
 And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
 You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
 A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
 Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
 We were never perfect.
 Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
 We might make them again, she said.
 Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
 You must make your own map.
Joy Harjo, “A Map to the Next World” from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2001. Copyright © 2002 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with permission of WW. Norton Press.
 
Wendell Berry, “The Wild Geese”
 Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze 
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell Berry, “The Wild Geese” from New and Collected Poems. Copyright ©1973 by Wendell Berry. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Counterpoint Press, counterpointpress.com
 

David Whyte, “The Journey”

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again


Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.
 
Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens
 
so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
 
Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
 
first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
 
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
 
someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.
 
You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.
David Whyte, “The Journey” from House of Belonging. Copyright © 1997 by David Whyte. Reprinted by permission of Many Rivers Press.
 
 
Evie Shockley, “anti-immigration”
 the black people left, and took with them their furious
hurricanes and their fire-breathing rap songs melting
the polar ice caps. they left behind the mining jobs,
but took that nasty black lung disease and the insurance
regulations that loop around everything concerning
health and care, giant holes of text that all the coverage
falls through. the brown people left, and took with
them the pesticides collecting like a sheen on the skins
of fruit. they went packing, and packed off with them
went all the miserable low-paying gigs, the pre-dawn
commutes, the children with expensive special needs
and the hard-up public schools that tried to meet them.
the brown people left, railroaded into carting off those
tests that keep your average bright young student outside
the leagues of ivy-lined classrooms, and also hauled off
their concentrated campuses, their great expectations, their
invasive technology, and the outrageous pay gap between
a company’s c.e.o. and its not-quite-full-time workers. they
took their fragile endangered pandas and species extinction
and got the hell outta dodge. the black people left and took
hiv/aids, the rest of their plagues, and all that deviant
sexuality with them. they took their beat-down matriarchies
and endless teen pregnancies, too. those monster-sized
extended families, the brown people took those. the brown
people boxed up their turbans and suspicious sheet-like
coverings, their terrifying gun violence, cluster bombs,
and drones, and took the whole bloody mess with them,
they took war and religious brow-beating tucked under
their robes. they took theocracy and their cruel, unusual
punishments right back where they came from. finally,
the white people left, as serenely unburdened as when
they arrived, sailing off from plymouth rock with nothing
in their hands but a recipe for cranberry sauce, a bit
of corn seed, and the dream of a better life. there were
only certain kinds of people here, after the exodus, left
to wander the underdeveloped wilderness in search
of buffalo, tobacco, and potable water, following old
migratory patterns that would have been better left alone.
 Evie Shockley, “anti-immigration.” Copyright © 2019 by Evie Shockley. Used by permission of the author. 
 
 POETIC THEMES
            Changing this week’s holiday from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day marks a clear redirecting of America’s energy and intention. Evie Shockley imagines a more extreme redirection, in “anti-immigration.” Fed up with the discourse about immigration policy and who gets to quality as authentically American, Shockley wryly portrays a mass exodus of unamerican Americans right on out of this country. The last stragglers are left to wander—and here the poetic tone is no longer edged, but earnest—and follow the old ways, “that would have been better left alone.”
            These old migratory patterns have been scattered and destroyed, and the “gift of reading the land” nearly forgotten, as Joy Harjo tells her “little one.” A map, one made of sand that “can’t be read by ordinary light” must be drawn from scratch, in order to “climb through the hole in the sky.” The few suggestions the poem is able to give for beginning this process are all deeply physical—rooted in mother’s blood and voice and song, father’s semen, the wall of intestine, the membrane of death, red cliffs, corn soup, deer meat. “Once,” she writes wistfully, “we knew everything in this lush promise.” The atrocities of the decimation of a people slice through this poem. The maps that need to be drawn after a genocide cannot be compared to the way that children of imperialists might find their way, on sacred stolen ground. It seems presumptuous to co-opt Harjo’s recipe for building a world map out of entrails and landscape, even or especially since most of our awareness of the patterns of nature are sourced from Indigenous wisdom.
            So in the interest of staying in my lane, I want to offer a “way-finding” practice that’s closer to home. It’s kind of a stretch to find Quaker themes in Wendell Berry. But one internet search reported that Berry’s love for sacred silence led him to confess, “maybe I’m a Quaker of sorts.” I’ll take it. He certainly shares the conviction among Friends that divinity exists in all of nature, “God’s second book.” Quaker modes of discernment rely on a quiet heart and a clear eye to listen intuitively for direction. In this season of quickly fading sun and ash, and the closing sky, there’s a sense of urgency to the discernment process. The light is dying. But what we need, he reassures us, is here.
            Perhaps Whyte thought of “The Wild Geese” when he wrote “The Journey,” importing Berry’s awareness of a twilight now-ness. The final line—“you are arriving”—similarly presses us to re-direct our focus to what is here and now, to discern our path. Both Berry and Whyte promise new life after loss—the taste of persimmon after the harvest’s end, and the “something new” to be found in the ashes of our lives. Both poets coax us urgently to find our way, to intuit our natural path like the wild geese. Whether we continue in our clear V and the sky closes, or we turn around into the light and the sky opens, we need to figure out where, individually and collectively, we are being called to move.
Both poems incite us to look within for a small, secret message reflecting the broader changing natural world around us. Berry finds the macrocosmic tree’s imprint in the marrow of a seed—as above, so below. Whyte perceives a mysterious message about openness and freedom written in the heavens but promises that we can find it mirrored in our hearts. The bones of black sticks, according to David Whyte, carry an inscription written by--someone. We don’t need to know where the message comes from, we just need to be willing to drop down into the ashes of our lives to look for it. Berry’s theology is more explicit: we can only perceive the message from the universe when we surrender to the divine, which is a process as natural—and sometimes as hard—as abandoning ourselves to love or sleep. In discerning our steps, we will make mistakes. We were never perfect. We must make our own map.
 

PRACTICE
            These broad themes of finding direction, intuitive listening, and reading the secret messages in nature open all kinds of possibilities for physical practice. Dancers might crave graceful, open-armed balances. The feeling of air in expansive, floating movements with lots of airtime in the transitions can mimic flight. Big geometric shapes with limbs extended can help evoke the silhouette of dark bird wings against light. The skeletal shape of the future tree in the seed could be expressed splayed out with bird wings spread, looking for the message written in the “wedge of freedom” under the line of the sternum.
           Here’s another way to awaken our awareness to secret signs. I’m not sure who began transposing the monastic practice of Lectio Divina into the worship of nature, “God’s other book.” My mother first taught it to me, and she learned it from Quaker teacher Nancy Bieber. Traditionally, Lectio Divina referred to scriptural reading, meditation, and prayer to promote communion with the divine. It does not treat scripture as texts to be studied, but as the living word. It takes in the word in four separate steps: read (bite); meditate (taste); pray (savor); contemplate (digest). In answering Oliver’s call to love this world through devoted, reverential attention, stop whatever you are doing and look, feel, smell, taste, listen. Allow your attention to be called to something beautiful (the word beauty is, after all, etymologically related to “calling”). Try not to penetrate or study what’s around you, instead try to adopt a passive role where you receive the call of beauty.
            Chew on it:
Approach what calls you, BE with that bark, blade of grass, bug, or crack in the cement. Touch it if you can. 
            Savor it:
Suspend any preconceived idea of what it might have to tell you. Try to free yourself from composing an idea in your mind, and instead truly listen with a mental blank slate.
            Digest it:
What is the nutrient-rich, life-giving message or substance this phenomenon relays to you? In contemplative stillness, consider: what is the line written there, and how does it speak to something in your own heart?